A Lazarus Soul: No Flowers Grow in Cement Gardens – A collection in love with the world in all its chaos

A Lazarus Soul’s follow-up to 2019′s lauded The D They Put Between the R & L is a really interesting confection, with Brian Brannigan, Anton Hegarty, Julie Bienvenu and Joe Chester reuniting for a reflective, ruminative record. Written in large part on Brannigan’s long walks across the Bog of Allen and the Royal Canal, there is a real sense of salve here, and a desire for the clarifying comfort to be found in nature.

The title of No Flowers Grow in Cement Gardens was inspired by a line from The Fall’s Psykick Dancehall (“my garden is made of stone”), and there is some familiar Mark E Smith- or Cathal Coughlan-like fury weaving its way through songs such as Black Maria, which explores police brutality amid driving drums and swinging bass, and a swagger that perhaps nods to Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds.

Brannigan’s voice, so strident and clear, is well-served by many of the sonic flourishes on this record, such as The Flower I Flung into Her Grave which contains a scuzzy guitar-driven wildness. Influenced in part by the equal wildness of Marina Carr’s 1998 play The Bog of Cats – it harnesses a morbidly dark and quixotic tone that is complemented by something like Wildflowers, which sounds like The Smiths crashing into The Pogues at a Dubliners concert. It has an old-fashioned stomping warmth, with glowing harmonium and coaxing, jangly guitar inviting us to a story that is firmly in the canon of good literary drinking songs.

Yet there is a surprising amount of tenderness on the record, with strings and acoustic guitar framing the delicately drawn portraiture on The Dealers, or the soft swing of G.I.M. The washed-out haze of Diver Walsh brings to mind Sonic Youth, and Factory Fada (an album highlight) with its lovely instrumentation that reveals a song about a “handball champion from the wilds of west Clare” and corporal punishment, bringing us back perhaps to the crumpled dream of a more idealistic or aspirational Ireland consistently betrayed by acts of violence – the “pebble-dash rage” Brannigan sings of on the affecting almost-lullaby New Jewels. The shininess of Glass Swans conjures up the ghosts of Orange Juice, and the title song brings to mind The Smiths again, perhaps more sonically than anything else, and their 1986 album The Queen Is Dead.

There are pleasingly evocative ambient flecks throughout – there in the opening moments of Black Maria, and again in Diver Walsh (and its Sigur Rós-like dreaminess), meeting us once more at the record’s close to guide us home. These moments really enrich the record, and speak to another thread that A Lazarus Soul might consider pulling further, since these moments, as simple as they might seem at first, suggest a profound and layered grace, and more than that – a continued deep romance for the world in spite of its continued chaos.